POLICE GIVE LOW RATINGS TO TV NEWS` FAKE BOMBS

New York Times News ServiceCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Two employees of a French television station, working on a story about airport security, were arrested Wednesday and charged with trying to check three packages containing fake bombs through Kennedy International Airport, the New York Port Authority police said.

Inside the packages, the police said, were typed messages that read in part: ''Congratulations! You have found our phony bomb! (made with molding clay, one alarm clock and wires.)''

The message, written on letterhead with the name of the station, TF1, also said: ''We will tell our 18 million viewers who watch our daily newscast at 8, that we found your company to be keen and consistent with security matters.''

The first package was found at the small cargo area of Trans World Airlines at 3:30 p.m. when an airline worker at the airline`s counter became suspicious of a 6-by-8-inch brown package that one of the television station employees wanted to check onto a flight to Paris. After inspecting the package, the airline employee discovered what appeared to be a bomb, the police said.

When police arrived, the television station employee, Bruce Frankel, 37, of New York, said it was a fake and took it apart as officers watched. He then told them he had delivered two similar packages to the small cargo areas of Pan American World Airways and Air France, the police said.

The messages were signed by the station`s New York bureau chief, Alain Chaillou, police said. Chaillou turned himself into the police Wednesday night.

Frankel and Chaillou were charged with violating federal explosives statutes. They were being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center and are to be arraigned before a federal magistrate Thursday.

The Air France cargo area was evacuated for a brief time after the authorities were notified about the suspicious package.

At the Pan Am small cargo check-in point, the package had been accepted and was being X-rayed when the Port Authority police seized the package.

In Amsterdam, a Dutch television station reported that its employees had smuggled a fake bomb onto a London-bound flight of an unidentified airline to demonstrate that terrorists could pass security checks with relative ease.

An imitation bomb was in an attache case carried onto the aircraft at an Amsterdam airport, the television station Veronica said.

It consisted of harmless paste made to resemble a plastic explosive of the type thought responsible for the Dec. 21 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people, the report said.